MAX and Me: Day 1

This seems to be the year that MAX, Adobe's annual developer conference, has finally gotten over the assumption that some attendees aren't familiar with Adobe and their products, and so the conference organizers need to offer introductory material and basic product pitches. This year, MAX seems targeted at the mid-level to advanced developer in a way that it has not in the past. I find that a most welcome change.

A lot has been written about the keynote and the conference by others, so I'll simply offer a brief summation of my experiences and the sessions I attended throughout the week.

• The Keynote, Day 1: Refreshingly free of the "Flash on mobile is going to be huge in the U.S. real soon now!" chant we've heard each year for the last couple of years, the keynote provided a good look at where the larger Adobe ecosystem is at, but not really where it's going next. Breaking down the company's initiatives in to three groups — cloud computing, social computing, and workflow across multiple screens — the keynote provided Adobe to show of current work in each of these areas and how many partners (more so than in keynotes past) are working with Adobe to create a broad and thriving system. The final bit of the keynote, with the self-recognizing devices sharing information across screens, was interesting, but didn't seemed a logical extension of where they are at now, and not what's next. I wasn't disappointed. I just wasn't too inspired.
  
  
• Delivering Multibitrate HD Experiences: Will Law did a great job at going through the technical details of the new multibitrate video support in Flash Media Server 3.5 and Flash Player 10. What's interesting about Adobe's approach is that they're letting the client determine when to switch between streams because of bandwidth unavailability (or availability), rather than the server. It's great to see that Adobe has finally brought this critical piece of the streaming video infrastructure to Flash, and they've made it easy to drop in a prebuilt video player, or for you to write your own and still take advantage of a lot of technical encapsulation.
  
  
• Forms Gone Wild: An average presentation about bad practices in form design which unfortunately didn't tell me much that was new. If you keep current on Web application usability, then this session wasn't particularly inspiring. I didn't agree with all the dictums laid out, but I could see why the speaker was making those points. I did, however, pick up one tip for handling bounced registration confirmation email messages that I thought was quite useful.
  
  
• Deploying ColdFusion into Large Scale Corporate Environments: The presenter in this session wasn't particularly strong, and the content seemed very poorly organized. Rather than talking about some key guidelines based off hundreds of hours of technical experience, what was instead presented was a laundry list of options for installing CF in an enterprise, multi-server, multi-box environment. I understand that everyone's setup is going to be different, but a few more concrete guidelines would have been quite helpful. What the session really cemented for me was that Adobe seriously needs to reconsider using JRun as the default J2EE server for CF. It's a product that Adobe has End of Life'd, it has memory leaks and performance problems galore, there is little to no documentation or support for the product, and configuring it properly for a specific situation is a black art known only by a limited few (who make good money doing that, as well they should). The session showed a raft of JRun configuration options without explaining them in any detail, and it just made me wonder why the hell Adobe doesn't simply license Tomcat — a powerful, well documented, well supported J2EE server — and use that instead.
  
  
• Playful Design: This session offered a look in to Adobe's index team, which focused on creating designs and experiences for five years for now. What was really interesting about the presentation was their emphasis on technical iteration — building a framework to play with, then iterating over and over until you reach something that you like. Some of the examples were quite interesting, but, again, for me, not really inspiring.
  

Some of my colleagues attended presentations which they said were great, and picking conference presentations really is like playing roulette. You may get black, red, or the occasional green but it's almost always a surprise.